Responsible Innovation: Past Present and Opportunities | Professor Dr. Tsjalling Swierstra
What is Responsible Innovation and why should business leaders and innovators care about it? What does Responsible Innovation mean in practice? What can we learn from Facebook in regards to the importance of building inclusive, responsible innovation that’s good for business and good for society?
FULL Episode 1: Past. Present & Opportunities
Professor Dr. Tsjalling Swierstra has been a key figure driving Responsible Research and Innovation in the Netherlands for over a decade. Professor Swierstra is the Head of the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University (Maastricht, the Netherlands). He is also currently an adjunct professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)(Trondheim, Norway).
Conversation highlights:
““Everyone speculates. The only question is how good you do it and what you speculate about.”
Emergence of Responsible Research and Innovation and what made RI scale Europe-wide:
Professor Dr. Tsjalling Swierstra touches on the role of 2008 Global Financial Crisis and other crisis that helped expand Responsible Innovation (RI) from national-level programs to Europe-wide scheme called Horizon 2020.
RRI builds on trends that have been developing since the 1960s and 1970s including disciplines such as Technology Assessment, Environmental Assessments and Medical Ethics. The term Responsible Research and Innovation started to appear around 10-15 years ago mostly in parts of America and Western Europe and then taking early root in countries including the UK, the Netherlands and some Scandinavian countries in the form of financial funding. While there are different opinions on what accelerated the Responsible Research and Innovation movement over the last decade, Professor Swierstra suggested that the 2008 Global Financial Crisis played a key role:
“Investments in technology innovation were at a risk of dropping radically because the market had high concerns… both in America and European Union… these governments stepped in and said we are going to fund innovation with essentially taxpayers’ money…. And if you say that taxpayers will have to pay for the new technology then, of course, the taxpayers also want to have a say in what is going to be developed.”
What is Responsible Research and Innovation?
For Professor Swierstra, RI has three elements:
1) Anticipation (by working with interdisciplinary teams)
2) Stakeholder Participation
3) Aspirational
Being “aspirational” demands innovators to do more than longer-term strategic thinking or simply innovation within the boundaries of what is possible or allowed today. It requires us to take on a more “positive” approach to innovation: to reflect deeply about who we are and to take our future into our own hands. What kind of future do we want to have? What kind of innovation do we want to develop to realise this future in a more inclusive, responsible way?
Facebook broadening the ethical agenda - “soft impacts”
Ethics has always been discussed as part of innovation but Professor Swierstra says the most focus was given to “hard impacts”.
“The basic message was: don’t create technology that poisons us, that explodes us or pollutes our environment. If it’s safe if it’s health if it’s not too dirty – go ahead”.
Controversies surrounding Facebook (and other technology giants including Google and Twitter), however, have broadened these conversations to include “soft impacts”
“With Facebook we see societal concerns and ethical debates, they are not about exploding…poisoning…They have to do with the quality of information that we can gather. With the polarisation of the population…maybe mis-educating us…privacy concerns… So there’s a lot of concerns that Facebook is affecting the social and cultural texture of our society…Not necessarily for worse…but it does raise questions about what is the responsible use of those media, what is the responsible ownership structure.”
Responsible Innovation: Envision Future Better
Should we scenario plan when we develop disruptive innovation?
Innovators and business leaders must face daily operational challenges, fierce competition, shifting customer expectations and shareholder expectations when developing innovations. Therefore, some executives may view this future-focused approach required by Responsible Innovation as unrealistic for business.
Tsjalling says, however, that we have no choice but to speculate, since speculating about the future is what we do daily in business and in life. The real question is: how good do we do it and what should we speculate about.
“The moment we leave our beds in the morning, we start anticipating the future…of course there’s no hard guarantee …but we make reasonable anticipations of the future… Everyone speculates. The only question is how good you do it and what you speculate about.”
The role of storytelling in helping guide innovation decisions:
Professor Tsjalling Swierstra uses the smartphone as an example of how, while new technologies may cause physical harm (hard impacts), many are actually causing far greater social, cultural changes (soft impacts). User stories can help individuals envision, more comprehensively, the diverse changes new technologies can bring to daily lives. “For example, we can make surveillance cameras like a tip of a needle. Do we want that? What will we do then?” (here’s a real-life example: South Korean sky cam).
